The Secret Psychology Behind Successful Writers on Medium

Today I'm going to show you exactly how to earn money with the new training that I'm preparing and that I'm going to be releasing next week. But I want to go back to the beginning a little bit and explain more so that you understand the story.

When I first started out, I was writing for my own product. I created a product.

I was writing articles about it, and I thought it was a super powerful strategy to write articles for all these different publications. Now I'm getting my word out to many different places. It was a genius strategy for me.

But when an editor rejected an article of mine, I was kind of annoyed because I put a lot of work into that. I was really looking to promote my stuff into a wider audience.

And so when I started my own publications, I thought I was going to do it different. I was just going to publish whatever came in and let the audience decide what's good or bad.

BECOMING THE EDITOR I ONCE DISLIKED

And there's some things I learned from doing that. But I want to get your feedback now because I've just become the editor that I didn't like. And I started to reject a boatload of articles, which kind of pains me to do, and I would like to get your feedback.

Should I just keep publishing what comes in or should I edit?

But before I go on, let me go back a little bit to talk about where this all started because back in March of 2025, I was publishing for my articles and for my publications, and there were very few others writing for me. Then a new writer joined, and he was publishing, and I sent him a few tips that he should add a referral link so he could make some money from his writing.

And after a while, I looked back at my publication. The stats started to grow and grow and grow. And when I looked into my stats, 90% of my traffic was coming from one writer — that new writer who I had been giving advice to.

WHEN THE STUDENT OUTGREW THE TEACHER

Within just a couple of months, his account grew way bigger than mine. And I'd been publishing for years, so I was a little bit burned by that. My ego was insulted. But soon I became his student.

I began collecting all of his articles and all of my own articles, and I used AI to study everything. Tell me, what's the difference? Why is his doing so well? What is mine missing?

I began to study the structure of his articles — the opening, the transitions, all of his credibility statements — you know, everything that I could find about his articles. But I also did this for many different authors all over the place. And I created some custom GPTs that would take my draft article and transform it into his content structure.

And it really helped me understand and learn and become a better writer by taking my stuff, transforming it, and then rereading it with this new psychology built right into it.

THE RISE OF THE AI PUBLICATION

Now, fast forward a little bit into July. The publication kept growing and growing. And in August, I started to do a whole bunch more deep studies. I took all of our statistics and I pulled in more than a thousand articles. I studied more than 100 different authors so that I could really see what was working and what was not.

The results were kind of surprising to me.

But I kept working with these content transformers.

And what I found by September was that many of my articles were changing from a 29% read ratio to a 73% read ratio. I was consistently getting over 60% read ratio on all of my articles from many different profiles.

And so I started to share what I found in a launch of a product called AI to Passive Income, where I had eight of my deeply researched content transformers put together. That new Gumroad shop earned $817 in the first 30 days, which I think is a fantastic success. I was very happy with that.

CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED WRITER

And now, I want to quickly jump back to confess about being a failed writer because I was the kind of writer that I now reject. I was doing a lot of self-promotion, and I really didn't tell the difference between what I was doing and what other people were doing.

I could see it. I could recognize it, but I couldn't understand it. I couldn't put my finger on it, and I certainly couldn't reproduce it.

So, it took me years to grasp the difference between the good content that really connects with the reader and the stuff that just gets ignored.

I was making content, and I thought a little result was good, so I would do more of the same content to get the results I needed. But it just resulted in my content being ignored. So, I was getting virtually no traction.

THE POWER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRIGGERS

So, instead, I started to learn from what's right in front of me.

Now, after using these content transformers for such a long time, I can instantly spot the difference between my stuff and the good stuff — the old stuff and the new stuff. It's a big difference, and it's so clear to see for me now.

One thing that I didn't recognize was the psychological triggers that were written into the good writing and the emotional elements that went into it.

Because at the time, I was writing from a place of difficulty and frustration and from being behind. So, I didn't have those emotional elements to naturally write into my writing. I was struggling and I wasn't able to write the happy psychological triggers that a good sales message needed.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH AI AND EMOTION

So, when I took my good ideas and I put them into the Transformers, they rewrote it with the correct psychological triggers. And when I read it, I thought, “Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I wish I would have wrote my stuff that way.”

And over time, it really helped me see the difference. I'm learning about my own psychology and my writing as I go through this stuff. It's a fantastic study. But the thing is, you cannot skip to the end. You've got to actually do something and show results and then you get those emotions of success that you can put into things.

And it really doesn't matter if you just made $8 — you get that feeling of success and you write about it. That's going to have the psychological triggers that just make the person want to read.

And when you're writing about your own struggles and the little successes, then that trust factor changes everything in your writing. People see that it's not just an AI article. It's actually what you did and this is how you made the results.

FROM CONTENT CREATOR TO CREATOR CURATOR

And that's the end of this video in this short series where

✅ I'm explaining the difference between being a publisher and an editor.

✅ I'm explaining the burnout wall.

✅ I'm explaining what 200 writers taught me that I could not learn alone.

✅ And I'm explaining how I'm going from creating content to curating creators.

Thanks again for being here. Be sure to subscribe and learn from those fantastic group of authors who taught me so much. Thanks again everyone.

Stay safe and here's to your success.